Hi! I'm Dr. Havanlandirma Seka. I teach and practice functional medicine, a personalized approach to health care that recognizes the biological uniqueness of each of my patients. I'm sharing my thoughts on this blog about health related topics that I'm interested in. This blog is for everyone who cares about health and hopefully you will find something of interest here.

We all know smoking is definitely not good for our overall health – the worst effects are on our lungs. But did you know that smoking tobacco also has serious repercussions on our oral health as well?

Aside from the negative effects smoking has on our general health (respiratory system, etc.) , studies show that smoking is also damaging to our oral health and is a cause of many issues including discolored teeth, to gum disease, to oral cancer.

Jim Thalmore a professor at the South Bay University of Dentistry says smoking tobacco can cause our tongue and our teeth to turn yellow. He says that staining on the tongue is also very evident among tobacco users.

Aside from teeth and tongue discoloration, tobacco use can even escalate to more serious oral health conditions like periodontal disease and oral cancer.

According to doctor Thalmore, the most serious of all oral health conditions is mouth cancer. He says it is difficult to predict what percentage of smokers are likely to get mouth cancer, but the death rate of those who do smoke is really high. He says over the last few decades, around forty to fifty percent of mouth cancer is attributed to smoking and tobacco use.

Dr. Tiana Pham, a colleague of doctor Thalmore, recommends going in for a dental check up at least twice a year, and three times a year if you have poor oral health or are a smoker. Dr. Tiana Pham is a dentist at Vibrant Smiles, a clinic in North Richland Hills, Texas. She regularly treats patients who are chronic smokers, and she often encounters patients who have discolored teeth or gum disease as a result. If teeth whitening is not enough to solve the issue, sometimes dental implants are necessary to fix the damaged teeth.

Over the years, I was able to successfully filter out the tips that worked and the tips that didn’t work, tips that left me all the more frustrated with myself. So here are painless ways to lose weight that have managed to slash off pounds of fat from my body to transform me into the person I am today. This blog post is dedicated to all those who are battling with weight issues. Here they are.

Anyway before anything else, as someone who’s conscious about his or her weight you’ve probably been told to do a lot of things from drinking lemon water in the morning, lunch and evening to eating insanely small servings of quinoa. It’s not to say that these aren’t effective but in this blog, I will be sharing realistic and time-tested advice that will surely melt all your fats.

Cooking with coconut oil.

Cooking food with oil makes dishes, even more, delicious no doubt about that, but there are certain oils that when used for cooking can make us fat. Coconut oil is an exception because coconut oil is found to be healthy. Coconut oil is high in special fats which experts refer to as medium chain triglycerides; these fats are metabolized differently compared to other fats. According to reports, coconut oil boosts metabolism by one hundred twenty calories per day and it also helps lower your appetite so you can consume fewer calories within the day resulting to weight loss.

It is worth noting that it’s not about adding coconut oil to what you are already eating is more on replacing your cooking oil with coconut oil.

Jafari is also an associate professor of pharmaceutical sciences and is currently working at the University of California-Irvine. Jafari together with his colleagues exposed embryos and larvae of fruit flies to different doses of green tea.

Fruit flies are mostly used to study human disease owing to the fact that these fruit flies share seventy-five percent of the genes that cause diseases in humans. Their team discovered that ten milligrams of green tea actually showed a slower development of larvae. The offspring when born also showed a drastic reduction in number and size.

Female offspring that were exposed to ten milligrams of green tea showed a decrease in reproductive output and a seventeen percent decrease in lifespan.

Moreover, the researchers also found that ten milligrams of green tea also resulted to morphological abnormalities in fruit flies’ reproductive organs examples of such is atrophy in the ovaries and testicles.

Even though it was found that green tea was able to protect flies from dehydration it also found to increase their predisposition to starvation and heat stress.

Even though the study did not evaluate the mechanisms by which green tea has affected the reproduction as well as the development of fruit flies, researchers theorize that high doses of green tea could produce excessive apoptosis or programmed cell death to yield such effects.

Perhaps one of the most talked about issues aside from politics is the struggle to lose weight. The enigma of what makes you lose weight and what doesn’t has haunted millions of men and women all over the world, myself included. My weight is erratic, but I was always overweight ever since then. It got worse over time and I gained so much weight despite my efforts to exercise inevitably my unending battle with weight loss resulted to a major breakdown.

A lot of people may think that I’m being shallow or insensitive for investing so much of my emotions over something physical, but you see, you don’t know my story and you don’t know my struggles. Yes, if you look at it objectively, there could be far worse problems than weight gain that would warrant a mental breakdown but every person is different. Your hair loss problems may be equivalent to a post-partum woman’s self-esteem issues whenever she sees stretch marks spread all across her once porcelain skin. You see, it’s not just some weight loss problem that you can dismiss just because it looks superficial or unimportant because for some people it’s all that matters and you have no right to judge them or tell them otherwise.

Anyway, my journey to weight loss has not been easy and this is perhaps one of the reasons why I get utterly sad from time to time. Here’s a little backstory of my life so you can better understand why I struggle so much with this topic. Back when I was younger I was bullied for my weight. Bullied to the point that I cry myself to sleep every night and I saw myself as a hideous and ugly fat person that no amount of compliment from my friends could ever change how I saw myself. I didn’t tell anyone I just silently wept my hurts and pains away. When I got into my teenage years apart from my weight issues I also struggled with acne, which made the bullying all the worse that it was.

Reports from the American Cancer Society estimates that around ninety percent of individuals who are diagnosed with oral cancer (cancer that affects the mouth, the throat, the tongue and the lips) have used tobacco. Similarly, the risk of oral cancer is six times higher among individuals who smoke compared to those who don’t smoke. The risk of oral cancer depends largely on the duration of your use of tobacco. In the other words, the longer you smoke or use tobacco, the higher your risk of getting oral cancer.

Some people often justify that using other forms of tobacco aside from smoking is safer. This is not true, in fact, tobacco regardless of its form has the same amount of risks and it is difficult to figure which among those is worse than the other whether tobacco is inhaled, smoked or chewed.

The bottom line of it all is that if you expose yourself to tobacco regardless of its form on a regular basis you are deliberately compromising your health. Pipe smokers, although they may not smoke as much, can still contract cancer of the lips since they are holding the pipe on the same position on their lips. There’s also a misleading myth that chewing tobacco poses fewer risks. Again, this has not been proven to be true.
According to reports, people who chew tobacco are at 4 to 6 times greater risk of getting oral cancer compared to individuals who do not use tobacco. Individuals who use smokeless tobacco are also at high risk of getting cavities and tooth decay because there are also certain chewing tobaccos that contain sugar to make it sweet and we all know sugar causes cavities.

If there is one thing you should know about me it’s my insane love for green tea. I love green teas so much that I can have it four to five to even seven times a day if there’s still enough hot water in the thermos. Yes, I am that addicted. So you can just imagine my horror when I read this morning that having too much green tea can be harmful to my health. The moment I read the headline, you guessed it, I was appalled to the point that I wanted to unplug my laptop right away and have enough of it.

I literally spewed hot tea on my laptop as my brain unwillingly absorbed the headline. I did my research and I compared mine with this. This blog post will explain the reason behind the shocking headline. And to be fair, green tea lovers do know that sometimes too much of a good thing is indeed bad for us. This is something we have to learn to accept regardless of how we feel towards green tea. Here’s a little something about the news article I just read and decided to share it to the rest of the world.

For years, people turned to green tea for its copious health benefits. But unfortunately, a new study is claiming otherwise. According to this study, this soothing beverage can actually do more harm than good when consumed in great amounts.

According to researchers who studied the effects of green tea, they found that drinking excessive amounts of green tea might be damaging to reproductive function and development. In a recent study published in the Journal of Functional Foods, the researchers show how being exposed to too much green tea actually impaired the reproductive function of fruit flies. And not only that it also destroyed the development of their offspring.